|
Posted Feb 28, 2016, 11:39 PM
|
Registered User
|
|
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 6,435
|
|
I'm guessing onni would have torn down that small SRO bldg between their two apt towers some time ago if it weren't for a city ordinance that bans the removal of low cost housing in dtla. unfortunate since bldgs like that have long given a very bleak, sad....or desperate....feeling to the hood.
I can't figure our why certain forumers become so resentful when assumptions are made about market trends in dtla. one of the ppl interviewed by the planningreport.com....presumably an expert in investment....is expressing some of the hesitancy about an over supply of new housing in the hood that mimics a bit of what dtladenizen has said. So be it. however, I do hope the other forumer, resident, is correct when he states that the hellens proj on broadway has not been cancelled. But whether correct or not, so be it.
someone private messaged me the other day about a post I made recently. that person was indignant about a comment of mine. I said this thread should not be treated like a social forum, where postings & the personalities behind them are seen as more important than the photos, the updates, the interesting rumors, insider info or news or merely descriptions of what dt was like on a certain day, at a certain time.
Forget the personalities, forget the generic chatter as though the dtla compilations page is a cocktail party or the gathering of various cliques in a high school. That's all piffle & a silly distraction....& is uninteresting compared with the pics, the updates, or the type of news from ppl like blackcat.
Quote:
ULI-LA’s Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2016: Historic Urban Transformation of LA’s Downtown
To explore the transformation of Downtown LA and continuing caution of lenders, TPR presents excerpts from ULI-LA’ s Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2016. The panel features David Sonnenblick, principal at Sonnenblick-Eichner Company, David Binswanger, executive vice president at Lincoln Property Company; Wayne Brandt, managing director at Wells Fargo Bank; Marcia Diaz, managing director at Prudential; and Mary Ann King, president and managing partner at Moran & Company.
David Binswanger: I was having a conversation with some people in the real estate business, and we think that Downtown has the greatest potential for urban transformation of any large city in the United States. We believe that because of psychology.
15 years ago, Staples Center was built in the middle of nowhere, on the south end of Downtown, away from all the activity on Bunker Hill. That mattered because, for the first time since probably ‘91 or ‘92, an executive or a business decision-maker living in Brentwood, the Palisades, or La Cañada had a reason to come downtown. That person would come down, watch a Laker game, jump in the car, and drive away as fast as possible.
Today, that same person comes downtown, they now go to a Clipper game instead, they go to their favorite restaurant, and go to a bar after. Then they jump into an Uber and go back home.
What happens tomorrow? All those same things, except that when they’re walking around, it dawns on them: My customers and my employees are all down here.
The wall that surrounded Downtown for 25 years has been broken down. There was this bubble that wouldn’t let anything out, and it wouldn’t let anything else from the rest of Los Angeles in.
How did that happen? $25 billion of investment in the last 15 years in Downtown. There are rooms downtown that could be housing, that could be condos, and that could be hotel rooms. There’s transportation. There’s entertainment and retail.
Let’s talk about transportation. $3.2 billion invested in Downtown. The Regional Connector and the Expo Line are right around the corner. Bigger game-changers than that? Uber. People are in a fragmented urban center today, with different neighborhoods: Chinatown, Arts District, Financial Core, Bank. Even if you lived in Downtown five years ago, you still needed a car. That’s not very urban. Today, you don’t. You push Uber and you can connect to all these different locations.
Next, let’s talk about retail. Olden-days retail was big box—Nordstrom’s, junior anchor—Best Buy, inline space, maybe a grocery store. At best, an outdoor mall in California. No longer. Today, retailers want to be authentic. They want to be exploratory. Millennials, in particular, want to create connectivity. Where do they connect? They connect at food: coffee, brunches, and dinners.
The best chefs in LA are coming downtown to open restaurants. They’re occupying the ground floors of what had been previously vacant—retail, beneath office, beneath residential. That’s creating the fabric and neighborhoods. It’s a much bigger game-changer, in my opinion, than the national firms that are now coming in—maybe with the exception of Whole Foods.
Let’s talk about hotels. 45 million people visited LA last year. 23 million, which is an all-time record, stayed overnight one night. Where was the biggest foreign travel destination to LA? China, at number one two years in a row, and predicted to be for a third year. Where are they coming? Mostly to our urban center. It’s familiar to them. There are big brands and names selling residential in China and helping promote Downtown Los Angeles. Coupled that with the Convention Center revitalization: 2,500 hotel rooms under construction and 2,500 more in the pipeline. That’ll move the Convention Center business from number 14 in the country easily into the top 10 and benefit directly hotel, residential, retail, with other ancillary benefits.
David Sonnenblick: Touch upon the change in office tenants, and the type of spaces that cater to these tenants. For those that decided to take a space downtown, what was the attractiveness?
David Binswanger: There are a lot of different product types downtown. Office is the lagger, statistically. I don’t think it’s the truth yet that tenants in preferred locations like Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Culver City, Santa Monica or Playa Vista would make a choice to be Downtown if they had available product at a relatively affordable rate in one of those other markets.
But like my psychological example, the walls have been broken down. It’s not so dissimilar from Hollywood: 10 years ago all the residential went in, now the retail’s built up, and now Hollywood’s probably the hottest market in LA. We’ve done 2 million square feet of net absorption in the last year—all new development. It’s been leased before it’s been finished. That’s what I predict for Downtown. As residents retailers, and entertainment comes in office will be the last to benefit.
But there’s clearly already been a trickle. Gensler’s move was prophetic. They were very quick to come down here and see the advantage in the space. It’s an amazing selling tool for their business. I think more and more architecture firms have woken up and said, “I need to be a part of that.”
Downtown now has the most cutting-edge tenants. The tenants that moved out of Santa Monica into Culver City during the last run-up are now being pressed out of Culver City, and they’re coming, kicking tires, usually in the most interesting product—Rising’s building, the Ford Factory building, The Desmond. They’re not yet looking at Gas Company Tower. But they probably will over time.
David Sonnenblick: Mary Ann, tell us why people want to be downtown in this urban core, and the type of people that we’re seeing living here.
Mary Ann King: All of us living or working in this city in this decade are going to remember this as a Golden Age in terms of our development. In 1999, Staples had been delivered, LA Live was on its way, there was a train system bringing people to Downtown LA, and there was an adaptive-reuse ordinance that allowed people to convert some of these old box buildings. There were 11,000 residential units in Downtown LA then, and 72 percent of those were affordable—deeply affordable, many of them. If somebody told you that they lived in Downtown LA, a logical assumption would be that they were on some sort of public aid or getting housing assistance.
Fast-forward to 2015, and there are 35,000 residential units in Downtown LA, and about 35 percent of those are affordable. Our profile has become much more market-rate. There are 10,000 units under construction, so in the next two and a half years, that number’s going to go up to 45,000, and that affordability profile is going to be at about 27 percent. Also, according to the BID, just under 60 percent of people that are living downtown also work in Downtown LA.
Marcia Diaz: Now reality strikes, after Mary Ann and David get you all excited about the transformation of Los Angeles!
In 2004, 2005 and 2006, we started seeing some new apartments being built—the Medici, for example. But it looked to us that the renters were USC and Fashion Institute students. Was this really, truly a new growth of residential living downtown? We just didn’t feel it at that time, so we weren’t very aggressive on Downtown residential. Again, still no retail. There was no grocery store yet.
Today, there’s definitely, in my mind, a major transformation. This is a viable new beginning of a 24-hour city. I don’t think we’re going to go back to the old days where nobody lives down here and there’s no retail. I see it as a viable investment market.
David Sonnenblick: How does Downtown LA stack up on Pru’s list compared to other major gateway cities, whether it be New York or San Francisco or Chicago?
Marcia Diaz: We are doing construction perm loans in other markets. We’ve done numerous deals in San Francisco and Seattle. We’ve done some in Boston. We looked at a deal here in Los Angeles, and I could not get myself comfortable with all of the product coming online. The lease-up was going to be coming online about the same time that all this other new property was coming online. So in that sense, less aggressive.
For a property that’s up, occupied, and leased—even if it’s new, but if at least it’s leased—we could be as aggressive as some other markets with the right borrower, because you’ve already taken that lease-up risk out.
|
Quote:
apparelnews.com
First the BNKR store was going to open last summer. Then it was to be at the end of last year. Then it was to be at the beginning of this year. Now the latest news is that the Australian-brand store opens its doors at the corner of Ninth Street and Broadway in downtown Los Angeles sometime in April, said Kendall Sargeant, the pr person for parent company Australian Fashion Labels.
Since the beginning of this year, black paper has shrouded the tall windows of the store, located a few doors up from the Ace Hotel and across the street from Acne Studios. The company is already advertising job opening at the downtown outpost.
BNKR, whose parent company is Australian Fashion Labels, was started in 2007 in Adelaide, Australia, by Dean and Melanie Flintoft. The retailer is best known for its fast fashions that are trendy contemporary labels sold at fairly reasonable prices. It has only one other store outside of the United States. That is in Adelaide. Australia.
|
^ I'm worried that some of these stores are entering dt.....certainly broadway....with too much optimism about the amt of business they can attract. I hope they do well, but things still look too iffy in sections of dtla where not enough serious shoppers are out & about.
• Video Link
|
|
|